Disordered World, page 15
Moreover, the Christian and Muslim worlds sometimes experienced comparable phenomena at the same moment. Just as there was a duality between emperors and popes, so too was there a duality between sultans and caliphs. In both cases, rulers with political authority and military power presented themselves as protectors of the faith, while pontiffs with spiritual authority tried hard to preserve their autonomy, their sphere of influence and the dignity of their office. In both cases, conflicts were frequent, and similar incidents occurred in Rome and Baghdad between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, when powerful monarchs feigned humble repentance at the feet of the man of God, but all the while were preparing revenge.
The difference is that Saint Peter’s successors managed to hold on to their throne while the Prophet’s did not. Confronted with the political and military power of the sultans, the caliphs faced one defeat after another, were stripped of their prerogatives and eventually lost all autonomy of action. One day in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman sultan quite simply appropriated the title of caliph, which he added to his other pompous titles and retained until Kemal Atatürk decided to separate the two roles again in November 1922. Sixteen months later, he abolished the institution of caliph with a stroke of his pen. The last caliph, Abdul Mejid, a talented painter who exhibited his work in various European capitals, died in exile in Paris in 1944.
Within Western Christianity, meanwhile, the popes remained powerful. In France, the fight to prevent the encroachment of religious authority in the political sphere was intense; until the early twentieth century, in fact, Rome condemned the very idea of the republic. Many Catholics viewed it as an impious regime, and when the opportunity presented itself in 1940, some of Marshal Pétain’s supporters were eager to do away with ‘the strumpet’.
In Islam, the problem was always the opposite: not the encroachment of religious authority on the political sphere, but the stifling of religious authority by political authority. And paradoxically, it is because of this, and because of the crushing predominance of the political, that religion spread through the body politic.
Chapter 4
What ensured that the papacy endured — and what the caliphate so desperately lacked — was a church and a clergy.
Rome was always able to mobilise its tight network of bishops, priests and monks, which covered every kingdom and province right down to the very smallest hamlet on Christian soil. They formed a powerful force, albeit ‘soft power’, which no monarch could overlook. The ruling pontiff also had the power to excommunicate or to threaten to do so, which in the Middle Ages was a formidable instrument that made emperors tremble just as much as the simple faithful. Islam had none of these things — no church, no clergy and no threat of excommunication. From the start, Islam developed a great distrust of intermediaries, whether saints or confessors. Man is supposed to be in direct dialogue with his Creator, speak only to Him, and be judged by Him alone. Some historians have compared this attitude to Luther’s Reformation and there are certainly similarities. Logically, this stance should have encouraged the early emergence of lay societies in the Islamic world. But history never advances in a predictable direction. No one could have foreseen that the enormous power of the papacy would one day end with the reduction of the place of religion in Catholic societies, while the distinctly anti-clerical sensibility of Islam, by preventing the emergence of a strong ecclesiastical institution, would favour an explosion of religion within Muslim societies.
Confronted with sultans, viziers and military commanders, the caliphs found themselves utterly helpless. They were unable to maintain the religious counter-power which was so useful to popes. As a result, princes exercised arbitrary power without restraint. The relatively free space in which embryonic modernity could grow never existed, or certainly not for long enough to allow cities and citizens to flourish.
But the papacy did not limit its influence to that of a counterweight to secular power. As official guardian of orthodoxy, it contributed to maintaining the intellectual stability of Catholic societies and even their overall stability. The lack of a similar institution in the Muslim world was conspicuous every time it was necessary to confront a rebellion that claimed religious legitimacy.
When radical ideas like those of the monk Savonarola in fifteenth-century Florence began to spread, Rome opposed them and its authority allowed it to put an end to them once and for all: the unfortunate Savonarola ended up being burned at the stake. Closer to our own time, and in a different vein, when Catholics in Latin America were tempted in the 1960s by liberation theology and some Colombian priests such as Camilo Torres found themselves under arms alongside Marxists, the church firmly stamped this out. I am not going to discuss the content of this theology, any more than I am going to consider Savonarola’s; what strikes me as significant is how efficiently the papacy cut short any such excesses.
In the Muslim world, a would-be Savonarola or Camilo Torres could not have been checked in the same way. In the absence of a muscular ecclesiastical authority with recognised legitimacy, the most radical ideas regularly spread among the faithful and could not be contained. Today as in the past, any social or political challenge can make free use of religion to attack the established order. Religious leaders in different Muslim countries are generally unable to oppose it, since they are appointed by those in power and are therefore literally in their pay, and consequently have only limited moral credibility.
In my view, it is the absence of a papal-style institution capable of drawing a line between the political and religious which explains the drift that affects the Muslim world, rather than a ‘divine directive’ creating confusion between the two spheres.
One might wonder if it doesn’t come to the same thing, but I don’t think so. At least not if we still have hopes of a future for humanity.
It is not unimportant to understand whether this lack of separation between politics and religion results from unchanging dogma or the contingencies of history. For those, like me, who persist in trying to find a way out of the global impasse we have got ourselves stuck in today, it is important to underline that the difference between the trajectories of the two ‘rival’ civilisations was determined not by an immutable celestial injunction but by human behaviour which can change, and by the historical course of human institutions.
All these institutions are human (I use that adjective purely descriptively, without making any assumptions about their spiritual function). The papacy was not established by the Gospels: there is no mention in them of a sovereign pontiff, of course, given that the title belonged to a pagan dignitary. Likewise, the caliphate was not established by the Qur’an, in which just two men are explicitly referred to by the term ‘caliph’ (meaning ‘heir’ or ‘successor’). The first of these was Adam, to whom God announced that he was giving the earth — and it is clear from the context that the world was thus being entrusted to the whole of humanity. The second was a historical figure to whom the Creator addressed these severe words: ‘I have named you caliph on this earth so that you govern with justice; do not allow yourself to be guided by your passions, which will lead you from the way of God. Those who depart from it will suffer a terrible punishment for having forgotten Judgement Day.’ The ‘caliph’ addressed thus was none other than King David.
Another paradoxical aspect of the papacy is that this eminently conservative institution has allowed progress to be maintained.
I shall illustrate this with an example which may appear trivial: when I was a child, a Catholic woman could not go to mass without covering her head and shoulders. Things had always been thus, and no believer, whether a serving girl or a queen, was allowed to transgress the rule, which the priests applied with zeal and sometimes humour. That makes me recall the priest who approached one of his flock and gave her an apple. When the young woman expressed surprise, he told her that it was only after tasting the apple that Eve realised that she was naked.
The poor woman was certainly not naked; all she had done was wear her long hair down, but clothing requirements could not be broken — until the moment in the early 1960s when the Vatican decided that henceforth women were allowed to attend church without a veil. I suppose that some people must have been irritated or even outraged by a decision that ran counter to an ancient tradition dating all the way back to Saint Paul. He had after all written in his first epistle to the Corinthians:
For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man. For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels.
Nonetheless, overnight these words from another age were deemed obsolete; no one tried to insist that Catholic women cover their heads, and it is reasonable to suppose that this advance will not be called into question.
Let me repeat because this is the point I want to make: the popes may have restrained any relaxation of the rule on clothing for nineteen centuries, but from the moment when they judged that this position no longer had any justification, from the moment when they finally took stock of how attitudes had changed, they proceeded to validate the change, so to speak, rendering it virtually irreversible.
In the history of the West, the institution of the church has often functioned in this way, contributing to the material and moral advance of European civilisation, and yet all the while attempting to restrain it. Whether in the domain of science, economics, politics or social behaviour, and especially in matters of sexuality, the papacy’s attitude has followed the same course. At the start, the church digs in, applies the brakes, fulminates, threatens, condemns and forbids. Then, after time (sometimes centuries) has passed, it reviews, re-examines and moderates its position. Next, with some reluctance, it accommodates itself to the verdict of human societies. The change is validated — codified, in a manner of speaking, on the register of permitted behaviour. From that moment on, there is no further tolerance of zealots who might wish to reverse things.
For centuries, the Catholic church refused to believe that the earth was round and orbited the sun. And, when it came to the origin of species, it initially condemned Darwin and evolution. Today, it would crack down on any of its bishops who interpreted the holy texts in too literal a manner, as some Arabic ulemas and American evangelists do.
The prevailing mistrust in the Muslim tradition, as in the Protestant one, of a centralising religious authority is perfectly legitimate and thoroughly democratic in its inspiration, but it has a disastrous side-effect: without that intolerable centralising authority, no progress can be irrevocably recorded.
Even when believers have lived their faith for decades in the most generous, enlightened, tolerant fashion possible, they are never completely beyond risk of a ‘relapse’, never shielded from some zealous interpretation coming along to sweep away their gains. Again — whether in the domain of science, economics, politics or social behaviour — something a benevolent fatwa authorised yesterday, a mean-spirited fatwa can forbid today with extreme rigour. The same controversies come up again and again over what is and is not permitted, and what is pious and what impious. Without a supreme authority, no advance is definitively validated, and no opinion expressed in past centuries is definitively marked as obsolete. For every step forward there is a step back, so much so that it becomes impossible to tell what is forward and what is back. The door is perpetually open to all forms of escalation, extremism and regression.
Regression is also the word that comes to mind when I read that some US schools which used to offer a rational education have suddenly begun to teach the next generation that the world was created six thousand years ago — on 22 October 4004 BCE, to be precise — and that if fossils are found on earth which seem to date from hundreds of millions of years ago, that is because God aged them through some miracle and placed them there to test the strength of our faith.
In general, strange and worrying beliefs are on the rise, which blithely announce the end of the world and even work to hasten it. These trends probably only affect a small proportion of Christians, some tens of millions of people. But the influence of that minority is not insignificant, given that it is situated in the United States and its members assiduously frequent the corridors of power, sometimes managing to influence the behaviour of the world’s sole superpower.
There are a thousand other things I could say, a thousand eloquent examples, to illustrate the impact of institutional, cultural, national or more generally historical factors on the comparative evolution of the two civilisations to which I belong — and the lack of impact of properly doctrinal differences.
My profound conviction is that too much weight is placed on the influence of religion on people, and too little on the influence of people on religion. From the moment in the fourth century when the Roman empire became Christian, Christianity became Roman — abundantly so. It is this historical circumstance which explains the emergence of a sovereign papacy. Taking a wider view, if Christianity contributed to making Europe what it became, Europe also contributed to making Christianity what it became. The two pillars of Western civilisation — Roman law and Athenian democracy — both pre-date Christianity.
Similar observations could be made about Islam and also about non-religious doctrines. If Communism influenced the history of Russia and China, those two countries also determined the history of Communism, whose destiny would have been very different if it had instead triumphed in Germany or England. Foundational texts, whether they are sacred or profane, lend themselves to the most contradictory readings. Hearing Deng Xiaoping claim that privatisation was in direct line with Marxist thought and that the successes of his economic reform demonstrated the superiority of socialism over capitalism may provoke smiles. But this interpretation is no more laughable than any other. In fact, it is certainly more in keeping with the dreams of the author of Das Kapital than the delirium of a Stalin, Kim Il-Sung, Pol Pot or Mao Tse-tung.
No one can deny, in any case, seeing the Chinese experiment unfold, that one of the most surprising successes in the history of global capitalism has happened under the aegis of a Communist Party. Is that not a powerful illustration of the malleability of doctrines and the infinite ability of people to interpret them any way they like?
To return to the Muslim world: if we try to understand the political behaviour of those who claim religious legitimacy and wish to change it, we will not identify the problem by searching holy texts, nor will the texts provide an answer. Hastily explaining everything that happens in different Muslim societies through the ‘particularity’ of Islam is to indulge in platitudes and condemn oneself to ignorance and impotence.
Chapter 5
For anyone attempting to understand contemporary reality, the notion that religions, ethnic identities and cultures are unique is a useful one, but it requires careful handling. If you disregard it, you will miss its subtleties; if you accord it too much importance, you will fail to grasp the essential.
Today, uniqueness is also an ambiguous notion. Was apartheid not expressly founded on ‘respect for the uniqueness’ of the blacks? Each of South Africa’s populations was supposed to follow the path its own culture destined it for, according to whether it was of European or African origin. Some were supposed to advance towards modernity, while others were supposed to be limited to their ancestral traditions.
The example of South Africa may appear outdated and caricatured. Unfortunately it isn’t. The spirit of apartheid is ubiquitous in the world today and is spreading all the time. Sometimes it is spread maliciously and sometimes with the best of intentions.
Perhaps I can illustrate this by recounting an incident which happened in Amsterdam at the beginning of this century. A young woman of Algerian origin went to the town hall with a project that was close to her heart: a club for immigrant women in her neighbourhood, which would enable them to meet each other, get out of the close family environment for a while, relax in a hamam and talk openly about their problems. A council official met her, listened and took notes. She asked her to come back a few weeks later to find out whether the council could help her. The young women went off feeling confident. When she returned on the specified date, she was told that unfortunately the project could not go ahead. ‘We consulted your local imam and he said that it wouldn’t be a good idea. Sorry!’
I believe that the civil servant who said this would not have thought she was promoting segregation, but rather was being eminently respectful. Was it not appropriate to leave it up to the ‘tribal chief’ to decide what should happen in an ethnic community? An ingenuous question comes to mind: if the young woman who presented the project had been European, would they have left the decision in the hands of her parish priest or pastor? Of course not. And why not?, one might ask equally ingenuously. The responses will inevitably be awkward. The answer lies in what is unspoken but understood, and in preconceptions about ethnicity. To put it bluntly, we act like this because ‘those people’ are not like ‘us’. You would have to be completely insensitive not to grasp that this ‘respect’ for the Other is a form of contempt and a sign of hatred. That at least is how those who are ‘respected’ experience it.
All human societies since the dawn of time have been affected by the tendency to consider others only in terms of their religious or ethnic differences. It is a way of thinking that sends people from elsewhere back to their traditional allegiances, a mental failing which prevents seeing beyond someone’s colour, their accent or their name. But in today’s ‘global village’, such an attitude is no longer tolerable because it compromises the chances of coexistence in every town and every country, and leads to irreparable rifts and a violent future for the whole of humanity.
